Girl In The Plain Brown Wrapper Read online

  I asked him what made him so sure I wouldn't just set up my own account and stuff the six hundred and forty thousand into it.

  His was a very tough grin. "Because it would screw you all up, McGee. It would bitch your big romance with your own image of yourself. I couldn't do that to any-body. Neither could you. That's what makes us incurably small-time."

  "That kind of money isn't exactly small-tune."

  "Compared to what it could have been by now, it is small, believe me." So he offered me five thousand to be errand boy, and I agreed. Payable in advance, he said. And after he had given me the documents, he would take off in the Likely Lady as a kind of decoy, and I was to start the day after he did. He said he would head for the Bahamas but then swing south and go down around the Keys and up the west coast of Florida to the home he and his gals hadn't seen for over a year and missed so badly, a raunchy sun-weathered old cypress house on pilings on the north end of Casey Key.

  That was on a Friday. He was going to give me the documents on Sunday and take the Likely Lady out to sea on Monday. At about noon on Saturday, while Helena and her daughters were over on the beach, they came aboard and cracked his skull and peeled the state-room safe open. It would have been perfect had not Mick Pearson wired his air horns in relay with a contact on the safe door, activated by a concealed switch he could turn off when he wanted to open it himself. So too many peo-ple saw the pair leaving the Likely Lady too hastily. It took me almost two hours to get a line on them, to make certain they hadn't left by air. They had left their rental car over at Pier 66 and had gone off at one o'clock on a charter boat for some Bahamas fishing. I knew the boat, the Betty Bee, a 38-foot Merritt, well-kept, Captain Roxy Howard and usually one or the other of his skinny neph-ews crewing for him.

  I phoned Roxy's wife and she said they were going to Bimini and work out from there, trolling the far side of the Stream, starting Sunday. At that time, as I later learned, the neurosurgeons were plucking bone splinters out of Mick Pearson's brain.

  I knew that the Betty Bee would take four hours to get across, so that would put her in Bimini at five o'clock or later. There was a feeder flight from there to Nassau leav-ing at seven fifteen. A boat is a very inconspicuous way to leave the country. Both Florida and the Bahamas have such a case of hots for the tourist dollar that petty officialdom must cry themselves to sleep thinking about all the missing red tape.

  It was two thirty before, in consultation with Meyer, I figured out how to handle it. If I chartered a flight over, it was going to be a sticky problem coping with the pair on Bahama soil. Meyer remembered that Hollis Candy's muscular Bertram, the Baby Beef, was in racing trim, and that Hollis, as usual, had a bad case of the shorts, brought on by having too many ex-wives with good law-yers.

  So it was three when we banged past the sea buoy out-side Lauderdale, Bimini-bound. Meyer could not hold the glasses on anything of promising size we spotted, any more than a rodeo contestant could thread a needle while riding a steer. And if I altered course to take closer looks, I stood the risk of wasting too much time or alerting a couple of nervous people.

  We got to the marker west of the Bimini bar at four thirty, and after a quick check inside to make certain the Betty Bee hadn't made better than estimated time, we went out and lay in wait five miles offshore. I faked dead engines, got aboard, alerted Roxy Howard, and we took them very quickly. Roxy was easily alerted as he had be-come increasingly suspicious of the pair. An Englishman and a Greek. It was useful to do it quickly, as the Greek was snake-fast and armed. We trussed them up and I told Roxy what they'd been up to as I went through their lug-gage and searched their persons. The envelope with the bearer bank draft was in the Greek's suitcase and with it was the signed letter to the bank identifying me, authoriz-ing me to act for Mick Pearson, with a space for my sig-nature, and another space for me to sign again, probably in the presence of a bank officer. The Greek had two thousand dollars in his wallet, and the Englishman about five hundred. The Englishman had an additional eleven thousand plus in a sweaty money belt. It seemed reason-able to assume that that money had come out of Mick's stateroom safe. As far as I knew, Mick had taken a good thump on his hard skull and certainly had no interest in bringing in any kind of law. Roxy was not interested in tangling with the Bahamian police authorities. And I did not think the Englishman or the Greek would lodge any complaints. And it was obvious that trying to get word out of either of them would call for some very messy en-couragement, something I have no stomach for. Theirs was a hard, competent, professional silence.

  So I gave five hundred to Roxy. He said it was too much, but he didn't argue the point. We off-loaded them into the Baby Beef, and Roxy turned the Betty Bee and headed for home port. I ran on down to Barnett Har-bour, about halfway between South Bimini and Cat Cay, and put them aboard the old concrete ship that has been sitting awash there since 1926, the old Sapona that used to be a floating liquor warehouse during prohibition. I knew they'd have a rough night of it, but they would be picked off the next day by the inevitable fishermen or skin divers. They had their gear, their identification pa-pers, and over twenty-five hundred dollars. And they would think of some explanation that wouldn't draw at-tention to themselves. They had that look.

  I ran back outside and into Bimini Harbor and found a place to tie up, where the boat would be safe. We caught the feeder flight to Nassau, and I called old friends at Ly-ford Cay. They refused to let us go into the city, and as they had what they called a "medium bash" going, they sent one of their cars to bring us over from the airport. We spent most of Sunday sprawling around the pool and telling lies.

  Monday morning I borrowed a car and went into the city to the main offices at Bay Street at Rawson Square. The size of the transaction made it something to be han-dled in a paneled office in the rear. I was given a receipt that gave the date and hour and minute of the deposit, gave the identification number of the bearer draft rather than the amount, and gave the number of the account maintained by Pearson rather than his name. The receipt was embossed with a heavy and ornate seal, and the bank officer scrawled indecipherable initials across it. I did not know then how good my timing had been.

  Meyer and I caught a feeder flight back to Bimini in the early afternoon. The day was clear, bright, and cool. The Stream had flattened out, but even so, a two-and-a-half-hour trip was more comfortable than trying to match our time heading over.

  The Likely Lady was all buttoned up when I walked around to D-109 to give Mick the receipt. The young couple aboard the big ketch parked next door said they had talked to Maureen, the elder daughter, at noon, and she had said that her father's condition was critical.

  I told Meyer and went over to the hospital. When finally I had a chance to talk to Helena, I could see that there was no point in trying to give her the bank receipt or talking about the money. The receipt would have meant as much to her at that moment as an old laundry list. She said with a white-lipped, trembling, ghastly smile that Mick was "holding his own."

  I remember that I found a nurse I knew and I remem-ber waiting while she went and checked his condition out with the floor nurses and the specials. I remember her little shrug and the way she said, "He's breathing, but he's dead, Trav. I found out they've got the room as-signed already to somebody coming in tomorrow for a spinal fusion."

  I remember helping Helena with the deadly details, so cumbersome at best, but complicated by dying in an alien place. He died at five minutes past one on Tuesday morn-ing. Had he died, officially, seventy minutes sooner, the whole bank thing would have been almost impossible to ever get straightened out. I remember the gentle persist-ence of the city police. But she told them repeatedly that the safe had been empty, that she could not imagine who had come aboard and given her husband the fatal blow on the head.

  She and the girls packed their belongings, and I as-sured Helena that I would see to the boat, get the perish-ables off her, keep an eye on her. I offered to drive them across the state, but she said she could
manage. She was keeping herself under rigid and obvious control. When I gave her the cash and the bank receipt, she thanked me politely. They left to go to the funeral home and, from there, follow the hearse across to Sarasota County. A very small caravan. Prim, forlorn, and quite brave.

  Yes, I knew that Meyer was remembering her too. I knew he had probably guessed the rest of it, perhaps wondered about it, but would never ask.

  The rain came down and Meyer cooked his famous specialty, never-twice-alike. We ate like weary contented wolves, and the yawning began early. Yet once I was in the big bed in the master stateroom, the other memories of Helena became so vivid they held me for a long time at the edge of sleep, unable to let go...

  3

  ... THERE HAD been heavy rains drumming on the overhead deck of the Likely Lady in August of that year in that lonely and protected anchorage we found at Shroud Cay in the Exumas, and under the sound of the rain I had made love to the Widow Pearson in that broad, deep bunk she had shared with the man who, by that August, had been almost six months at rest in Florida soil.

  She had come back to Lauderdale in July. She had dropped me a note ha June asking me to have someone put the Likely Lady in shape. I'd had her hauled, bot-tom scraped and repainted, all lines and rigging checked, power winches greased, blocks freed, both suits of sail checked, auxiliary generator and twin Swedish diesels tuned. She was less a motor sailer in the classic sense than she was a roomy, beamy powerboat rigged to carry a large sail area, so large in fact that she had a drop center-board operated by a toggle switch on the control panel, and a husky electric motor geared way, way down. There was maybe two tons of lead on that centerboard, so shaped that when, according to the dial next to the toggle switch, the centerboard was all the way up, sliding up into the divider partition in the belowdecks area, the lead fitted snugly into the hull shape. Mick had showed me all her gadgetry one day, from the automatic winching that made sail handling painless, to the surprising capacity of the fuel and water tanks, to the capacity of the air-condi-tioning system.

  I wonder who has her now. I wonder what she's called. Helena came over on a hot July day. She was of that particular breed which has always made me feel inade-quate. Tallish, so slender as to be almost, but not quite, gaunt. The bones that happen after a few centuries of careful breeding. Blond-gray hair, sun-streaked, casual, dry-textured, like the face, throat, backs of the hands, by the sun and wind of the games they play. Theirs is not the kind of cool that is an artifice, designed as a chal-lenge. It is natural, impenetrable, and terribly polite. They move well in their simple, unassuming little two-hundred-dollar cotton dresses, because long ago at Miss Somebody's Country Day School they were so thoroughly taught that their grace is automatic and ineradicable. There are no girl-tricks with eyes and mouth. They are merely there, looking out at you, totally composed, in al-most exactly the way they look out of the newspaper pic-tures of social events.

  I asked about her daughters, and she told me that they had gone off on a two-month student tour of Italy, Greece and the Greek Islands, conducted by old friends on the faculty of Wellesley.

  "Travis, I never thanked you properly for all the help you gave us. It was... a most difficult time."

  "I'm glad I could help."

  "It was more than just... helping with the details. Mick told me he had asked you to... do a special favor. He told me he thought you had a talent for discre-tion. I wanted those people... caught and punished. But I kept remembering that Mick would not have wanted that kind of international incident and notoriety. To him it was all some kind of... gigantic casino. When you won or you lost, it wasn't... a personal thing. So I am grateful that you didn't... that you had the instinct to keep from... making yourself important by giving out-any statements about what happened."

  "I had to tell you I'd caught up with them, Helena. I was afraid you'd want me to blow the whistle. If you had, I was going to try to talk you out of it. The day I get my name and face all over the newspapers and newscasts, I'd better look for some other line of work."

  She made a sour mouth and said, "My people were so certain that Michael Pearson was some kind of romantic infatuation, we had to go away together to be married. He was too old for me, they said. He was an adventurer. He had no roots. I was too young to know my own mind. The usual thing. They wanted to save me for some nice earnest young man in investment banking." She looked more directly at me, her eyes narrow and bright with anger. "And one of them, after Mick was dead, had the damned blind arrogant gall to try to say: I told you so! After twenty-one years and a bit with Mick! After having our two girls, who loved him so. After sharing a life that..."

  She stopped herself and said, with a wan smile, "Sorry. I got off the track. I wanted to say thank you and I want to apologize for being stupid about something, Travis. I never asked, before I left, what sort of... arrangement you had with Mick. I know he had the habit of paying well for special favors. Had he paid you?"

  I "No."

  "Was an amount agreed upon?"

  "For what I had thought I was going to do. Yes."

  "Then did you take it out of the cash before you gave me the rest of it, the cash that had been in the safe?"

  "No. I took out five hundred for a special expense and two hundred and fifty for a rental of a boat and some in-cidental expenses."

  "What was the agreed amount?"

  "Five thousand."

  "But you did much much more than what he... asked you to do. I am going to give you twenty thousand, and tell you that it isn't as much as it should be."

  "No. I did what I did because I wanted to do it. I won't even take the five."

  She studied me in silence and finally said, "We are not going to have one of those silly squabbles, like over a restaurant check. You will take the five because it is a mat-:r of personal honor to me to take on any obligation Mick made to anyone. I do not think that your appreciation of yourself as terribly sentimental and generous about widows and orphans should take priority over my sense of obligation."

  "When you put it that way--"

  "You will take the five thousand."

  "And close the account without any... squabbling."

  She smiled. "And I planned it so carefully."

  "Planned what?"

  "You would take the twenty thousand and then I would feel perfectly free to ask you a favor. You see, I have to go to that bank in Nassau. On the transfer of those special accounts there has to be an actual appear-ance in person, with special identification, as prearranged by the owner of the account. I was going to fly over and see them and fly back, and find someone to help me take the Likely Lady around to Naples, Florida. A man wants her, and the price is right, and he would pick her up here, but... I can't bear to part with her without... some kind of a sentimental journey. So I thought after you took the money, I could ask you, as a favor, to crew for me while we take her over to the Bahamas. Mick and I planned every inch of her. We watched her take shape. She... seems to know. And she wouldn't understand if I just turned my back on her. Do you find that gro-tesque?"

  "Not at all."

  "Would--?"

  "Of course."

  So we provisioned the Likely Lady and took off in the heat of early July. I had the stateroom Maureen and Bridgit had used. We fell into an equitable division of the chores without having to make lists. I made the naviga-tion checks, kept the charts and the log, took responsibil-ity for fuel, engines, radio and electronic gear, minor re-pairs and maintenance, topside cleaning, booze, anchor-ing. She took care of the proper set of the sails, meals, laundry, belowdecks housekeeping, ice, water supply, and we shared the helmsman chore equally.

  There was enough room aboard to make personal pri-vacy easy to sustain. We decided that because we were on no schedule and had no deadlines, the most agreeable procedure was to move during the daylight hours and lie at anchor at night. If it was going to take too long to find the next decent anchorage, we would settle for an early stop and then take off at first lig
ht.